Seams

Stephen Melville is one of the most thoughtful critics to emerge in recent years. He has applied the tools developed by Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan to the problems of contemporary art. With his roots in Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, he reopens questions of art's reception, interpretation, and commentary. Not only does he articulate the limitations of these catagories, and how they are set into motion - stasis and balance are not the goal. He demonstrates how the territory of each of these discourses in maintained by their relationship to one another. Melville's texts not only represent the complexity of his subject, but also the intricate interface between the art object, history, and philosophical interpretation.

Melville, Stephen; Gilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy

Introduction by Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe; introduction1 Stephen Melville and Art's Philosophical Attitude Toward History; Part 1 Essays by Stephen Melville; Chapter 1 Robert Smithson; Chapter 2 Description; Chapter 3 Aesthetic Detachment; Chapter 4 Positionality, Objectivity, Judgment; Chapter 5 Psychoanalysis and the Place of Jouissance; Chapter 6 Division of the Gaze, or, Remarks on the Color and Tenor of Contemporary "Theory"; Chapter 7 Color has not Yet been Named; Chapter 8 Notes on the Reemergence of Allegory, the Forgetting of Modernism, the Necessity of Rhetoric, and the Conditions of Publicity in Art and Criticism; Chapter 9 Compelling Acts, Haunting Convictions; Chapter 10 Painting Put Asunder; Chapter 11 Postscript;